The Haunted Beach (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 4) (21 page)

“They couldn’t keep Sylvie out of Frieda’s house,” Ed said. “The girl has always been unstable, and when Claire came to Santorini, she had to bring her along. She needed to keep an eye on her. They were in the habit of keeping her hidden because she was useful for alibis, since she looked so much like her mother. Besides, Claire never knew what Sylvie would say to people. I’ll use the names we’ve always known them by, I think, instead of calling them Jerry and Elvira.”

They were spread out along Ben’s kitchen counter and breakfast nook. On the high-boy chairs at the counter were Parker, Dan and Ben. At the breakfast table were Lily, Teddy and Taylor, who had unaccountably been waiting in Ed’s driveway at one in the morning when Detective Bruno had shown up. Taylor said she had “had a feeling,” and Lily, trusting the vibes, had dragged Teddy out of bed to go along. When Porter had lunged at the door, Taylor had looked down at him and firmly said, “Stay.” He usually ignored that word, but something in her tone of voice got through to him for once. He sat down and glared as they left.

After the paramedics had arrived at Willa’s house, Detective Bruno had driven up, gotten out of his car and looked around calmly. In the glare of vehicle lights and the organized chaos of Emergency Services, Santorini Drive was as confused as a druggy dance party from the 1980s, and was similarly lit by swirling lights.

When Bruno noticed the clutch of neighbors standing together like a Greek chorus, he ordered them into Ben’s house, which was closest and largest, and where he’d notice if anybody tried to sneak out. Then he checked with the professionals and got sequential, straight answers: three gunshot victims, two dead, one hanging on by a thread.

His partner, Miles Carver, materialized out of the gloom with an ethereal young lady, introduced her as Sylvie Stancel, and quietly allowed her to babble out her entire life story. Bruno already knew who she was, of course. After Ed’s phone call, he had gotten onto the National Crime Information Center database and read her parents’ entries, but he listened carefully anyway. Then she had been passed off to a police officer, who happened to be young and handsome. She transferred her iridescent smile to him and went away happily.

Looking up at Ben Brinker’s house with resignation, Bruno and Carver then went in and debriefed the neighbors, calmly enduring the digressions, rising and falling emotions and acting out of the players involved.

Ed finished the cross-talk session by addressing Detective Bruno. “I may have been somewhat vague earlier on the telephone, but I was doing the best I could under the circumstances.” He refrained from pointing out that his, Ed’s, taxes paid his, Bruno’s, salary, since he had gotten poor results with that line in the past. But there was no mistaking the fact that he was nettled about having to face the crisis without police backup.

“Yes,” Bruno said placidly, “I probably should have listened better. Having met you in person, I should have realized that what you said would need some sorting out, but might actually be important. We’ll leave that for another time. Maybe we’ll also discuss how you knew those two characters were convicted felons.”

Ed remained silent.

“Anyway,” Bruno went on, “I guess we should be grateful. We were looking in another direction entirely.”

Ben made a snorting noise, but said nothing.

Detective Bruno gave him a broad, sidewise look, but didn’t apologize. Instead, he went on smoothly. “Without you poking around where you didn’t belong,” (here he gave Ed a look that sent shivers down his spine), “that shooting would have been written off as a murder-suicide, until it was too late to catch Elvira Stancel, a/k/a Claire Ford. She would have taken off to a nice, remote, tropical island in another country and lived happily ever after.”

Ed straightened up and very formally said, “You’re welcome.”

Bruno grinned. “Don’t press your luck.”

Now the neighbors were huddled together without any cops around. Nobody had wanted to go home and be alone, so Taylor had put on a pot of coffee and they had drifted to seats around the kitchen area.

Ed, leaning against the cooking island and facing them all, continued his somewhat circular explanation of what had just happened.

“So Claire was here to pull off a real estate swindle. Simple. The house where Claire was living had been empty since the elderly widow living there had died, and her few relatives were living in Hawaii and not paying much attention to it. Rod was notified by a co-conspirator at a title company that there was a valuable property here that was ripe for the picking. They’d pulled this kind of a scam before, fraudulently getting title to the house, then selling it and moving on before anybody noticed something was fishy. He was busy with something up in Georgia, so he sent Claire.

“She presented herself as a widow; it would get her sympathy, people wouldn’t ask too many questions, and nobody would question it if she immediately put it up for sale again. Their real estate swindles had worked so well in the past, they were getting complacent. This was a much more beautiful house than they usually targeted, and Claire wanted to live there while she waited for Rod to finish up yet another sweetheart scam in Dalton. They figured she’d only be here a couple of weeks, at the most, but this time, things were different. At the neighborhood party, Claire discovered Willa, who screamed to be another of Rod’s victims. He’d marry a woman, take everything she had, take out a mortgage on her house, run up debts in her name, then disappear. Their contact at the title company let them know that Willa had clear title to her house.

“So Claire brought him in. He rented the Greene’s house as a disinterested stranger, and they ended up being here longer than they had planned: long enough for Sylvie to start causing trouble, and for Claire to fall in love.

“While they were here, they tried to keep Sylvie hidden. They had to trade her off to keep her away from the cleaning ladies, and at first, she behaved herself. But when things went on longer than usual, Sylvie got bored. She started slipping out, dancing on the beach at night, playing games with Dolores, and of course, exploring that wonderful, empty mansion at the end of the block. She figured out the garage code, and once inside, she found a duplicate house key. She used the key from then on, coming and going through the back door as she pleased, while we were using the garage.”

“But why did they have to kill my wife?” Ben asked.

“One night Rod went into Frieda’s house looking for Sylvie and saw the portrait that Dolores had done of Frieda’s ghost, hanging on the wall. It looked
exactly
like his daughter, who looked very much like Claire. He knew he had to act. It was only a matter of time before somebody realized Dolores wasn’t seeing things after all. If they started looking for Frieda’s impersonator, they would probably suspect Claire, which would have been a nuisance, or they might even catch Sylvie, which would have been fatal. He knew that if they caught his daughter, she would tell them everything, just as she blurted it all out to the police tonight.

“Rod took the painting from Frieda’s house and destroyed it, not knowing that there were many more in Dolores’s studio. He already realized he couldn’t control his daughter, so he decided he had to kill Dolores. It was about that time, remember, that the blasted twins recruited me to investigate. I’m a skeptic. I might have discovered that ‘Frieda’ was real, not a ghost. I was also going to watch the beach at night. I might have found Sylvie. But nobody would have been surprised if Dolores had drowned one night. End of problem.

“Here’s what I think must have happened: Rod decided on murder, and decided how and when he was going to do it. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that Peggy Peavey had been snooping around, and she was there on the beach that night. Peggy was a blond, and about the same size as Sylvie. Rod must have assumed she
was
Sylvie when he came out to commit the murder. He ignored her and pulled Dolores into the water. When Peggy realized what was happening, she tried to run, or tried to help Dolores, and he realized his mistake. It wasn’t his daughter, it was one of the neighbors, and now he had a witness on his hands. He had to kill her, too.”

“I knew she wasn’t playing tricks on Dolores,” Parker said. “She wouldn’t have done that.”

“No,” Ed agreed. “Rod needed Dolores to be found on the beach, but he let Peggy go out to sea. He didn’t want to wait for Dolores to be declared dead. There was a distinct possibility she’d be leaving some of her fortune to Willa, whom he planned to marry. Also, he might have realized that Ben would have the same motive: wanting her declared dead immediately so he could inherit. He probably hoped it would divert suspicion to Ben, which it did. Dolores was easy to overpower and had no telltale marks on her body, but Peggy had obviously been murdered. So he made sure the tide took her out. He hoped to finish up in Santorini and disappear long before her body came back, if it ever did.”

“Wait a minute, Ben said. “All this must have happened before you and I got out onto the beach that night. I went all up and down the beach; she wasn’t there. And it didn’t happen after we left the beach, or we would have seen her lying in the sand from my house, later.”

Ed took a deep breath. “I believe the fact that you and I were roaming the beach that night and going back and forth in Santorini meant that Rod spent a very long night on the beach, hiding on the dune with a dead body.

“When Rod realized that the second woman with Dolores was not Sylvie, he called Claire to make sure his daughter was at home. She wasn’t. When she saw Dolores with another woman on the beach, Sylvie must have gone into Frieda’s house. Rod knew I was investigating and might find the body right away, and if their daughter arrived on the beach suddenly when it was swarming with cops, he knew she’d blurt out everything, just like she did tonight.”

“So that was Sylvie that I saw in Frieda’s house when we were leaving the beach,” Ben said.

“Right,” Ed told him. “When she heard us coming in the garage, she ran out the back door. Rod had carried Dolores up to the dune and hidden her, waiting for Claire to tell him she had Sylvie back home. Instead, Claire looked out the window and told Rod to hunker down; the neighborhood was too active. Once we got into Frieda’s house and put the garage door down, Claire hurried out to the beach to look for Sylvie.”

“So the two figures we saw from the third floor must have been Claire and Sylvie,” Taylor said.

“Right,” Ed said. “They looked like they were dancing along the water’s edge, but really, Claire was trying to chase Sylvie down. Before we could get back to the beach, they had taken another walkover and gone back home down A1A. Claire got Sylvie home just before we came back and started roaming between the houses in Santorini. She told Rod to stay put. Finally, hours later, Claire let him know Santorini had quieted down, and he’d better set the scene before people started coming out to watch the sunrise. He washed Dolores in the ocean, settled her in the sand and came back. Then he took Sylvie to his house and sat on her while Claire went out make sure the body didn’t wash away. When she saw Dan coming down the walkover, she ran to him, screaming she’d just found Dolores, dead. All she had to do was act hysterical, which was probably easy after the night she’d had.”

“They had it all worked out, except for one little thing,” Taylor said.

“Right,” Ed said. “Rod was so used to being able to control women that it never occurred to him that his wife would fall in love with another man. He’d been using women since he’d been young and good-looking. He was older and less attractive now, but he still thought he had ‘it’ when it came to women. Right up to the end, he never believed Claire would leave him, even after she suggested they split up. He thought he owned her, right up until the moment she pulled out a gun and shot him. Then, of course, she had to kill Willa too, since she was staging a murder-suicide.”

“Would that have made sense?” Lily asked, fascinated. “Why would Willa kill her new husband, not to mention herself?”

“Her motive was to be that she’d found out she’d married a con man, and couldn’t face the humiliation. Rod’s body would certainly have been identified as that of Jerry Stancel eventually, but by then, Claire planned to be long gone. Dan had asked her to go away with him.”

“I asked her to marry me,” Dan said. “I didn’t say anything about running away. I like it here. I didn’t want to leave. But she must have assumed I was the kind of guy who would just take off.”

“Um, yes,” Ed said. “You do project that character type. By that point, Claire no longer cared about the money; she just wanted out. But she needed to make sure Rod wouldn’t come after her, and she knew that if he was alive, he’d find her. So she killed him. Next, she shot Willa and was about to plant the gun on her when we charged in and found her still holding it.”

“And then,” Dan said, “it was a matter of killing as many people as she needed to in order to get away.”

“She’d never have killed you,” Parker said. “She was in love with you.”

“If I didn’t go along with the mass slaughter, she was prepared to gun me down with the rest of you,” he said bitterly. “She loved herself more.”

It was daylight by the time Taylor trailed Ed back to his house. Teddy and Lily had come in a separate car, and they left.

“I’m very tired,” Ed said pointedly.

“You’re not going to bed now and we both know it. You’re too wound up to be able to sleep, and so am I.”

“I think everything that needed to be said has been said,” he told her. Then he stopped. “Except for one thing, perhaps. When Sylvie first came into Willa’s house, she claimed she had never used Frieda’s perfume. I didn’t want to mention that in front of the others. Interesting, no?”

“Huh! How did that come up?”

“I asked, of course.”

“For the sake of completeness,” Taylor said, straight-faced, but giving him a wink. “Only you would fixate on a detail like that while all hell is breaking loose. Okay, I have a question. When we were talking the other day, you said somebody lied. Who was that? What lie?”

“I believe you said the same thing. You first: did you catch the same lie that I did?”

She lifted an eyebrow, but let him get away with it, just because she didn’t want to get tangled up in digressions. “Claire lied. She came up with some song-and-dance about her sister-in-law trying to get at her inheritance. But even if there was no will, the wife would inherit, and in her story, the sister-in-law didn’t have any documentation to back her story up. Of course, now I see that she just didn’t want Rod to find out about her affair with Dan. But at the time, it puzzled me. Okay, now you. Did you catch that one too?”

“Actually, I was talking about Rod. I wanted to find out more about the man Willa had married, and I had been, um, picking around the internet, looking here and there, finding out this and that –“

“Ed! Were you hacking into police databases?”

“That kind of thing is not strictly necessary,” he said evasively. “For a slight fee –“

“Ed! You clever devil! I’m proud of you. Gimme five,” she said, leaning forward and raising her hand.

“Five what?”

Taylor sat back and smiled.

“To continue,” he said, uneasy at missing yet another societal pivot point, “I managed to find the name Rod Johnson in a list of aliases of a man named Jerry Stancel, who’d been convicted of fraud. He’d married an octogenarian and gotten control of her estate. Her rightful heirs sued. When I looked up his booking photo, I recognized our Rod. Apparently, his alias, Rod Johnson, was something of an inside joke,” he said, looking stuffy and uncomfortable. “He found it too good to let it go, and his marks usually weren’t internet savvy. Willa certainly isn’t. So I knew Willa had married a con man, and was in big trouble. After you left, I was planning my next move when I ran across a picture of him with his wife and co-conspirator, Elvira. Our Claire. With that information, I knew I needed to act. It became obvious that something bigger was afoot. They had probably committed two murders already. Willa might be in mortal danger.”

“Because Claire was in love with Dan?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Only a blind man could’ve missed it. Did you really not notice?”

“What really mattered,” he said, a little louder than he needed to, “was that
Dan
had fallen in love with
Claire
. He always seemed so . . . remote. Uninvolved. Inviolable.”

She snorted. “He’s flesh and blood like everybody else.”

“So it would seem.”

“And you went right over and told him his girlfriend was an ex-con. Good move, Ed. Has it hit you yet that if Dan was a more dishonest man, you’d all be dead by now?”

“That’s enough sarcasm, I think. I did manage to save Willa in the end. It looks like she’s going to pull through, thank God. Claire would have made sure she was dead, if nobody had been there to stop her.”

“Yes, you did manage to save Willa. I’m sure she’s going to be
very
grateful.”

When Ed didn’t get it, she said, “Are you two going to start talking to one another now?”

“We’ve always been very cordial.”

“’Cordial,’ is the way you describe a business relationship. You’re in love with her and you know it. What you don’t seem to know, because you’re selectively blind, is that she is in love with you.”

He gaped at her. “Do you really think so? After all she married another man.”

“Only after you dragged your feet for years. She wasn’t getting any younger, and she wanted a life. She figured Rod was her last chance. If you want to know if she loves you, go ask her yourself. And bring flowers.”

“Flowers, right,” he said, writing it down on one of his little note pads.

“And candy. Chocolates, the kind in a fancy box. Not breath mints.”

“Chocolate, fancy box,” he murmured as he wrote.

“And when she’s off the ventilator, take her in your arms and give her a big, passionate kiss. On the lips. Write that down.”

He had stopped writing and was gaping at her. “Taylor, are you being witty now? I can’t tell. This means a lot to me.”

She took pity on him and said, “A little kiss on the cheek would be nice for starters. Big, passionate kisses after the first date. You’d better call me ahead of time about the first date, so you don’t make any huge blunders.”

She was preparing to leave when the cat Bastet came regally out of nowhere and began to follow her to the door.

“You’re leaving?” Ed asked the cat, looking hurt.

“Apparently so,” Taylor said. The cat preceded her out the door.

Taylor looked back at Ed and paused, then said, “I know why she wanted to stay with you. You were right and I was wrong. I thought Ben killed his wife. You knew he hadn’t. She wanted to be with the one she could influence. Whose mind wasn’t closed. This time, that was you.”

Ed gazed at her silently.

Then she said, “I guess it’s really over now.”

She closed the door softly behind her.

Ed had a few days to collect himself before the twins came to clean again. In the meantime, the investigation for the lady from New Smyrna Beach had wrapped itself up neatly. When he saw her name on the Caller I.D., he’d braced himself, but she couldn’t have been nicer. It turned out that she had suspected her brother all along. She thanked Ed prettily and fired off a check that same day with a nice tip added to it.

Still, he was not looking forward to getting back to normal. The twins hadn’t shown up right after the final set of murders and tried to get information out of him. They could get into his house any time they wanted, just by bringing baked goods; still, they hadn’t come. By Monday morning, he believed, the pressure would have built up to the point of imminent explosion, and Ed fully expected them to come in and explode right in his face.

But when they arrived, they were all business. They even appeared subdued. And despite the fact that they knew Teddy wouldn’t be there, they had brought blueberry muffins, baked fresh that morning. He was pleased, in a greedy sort of way, but he was still keyed up, waiting for them to blow. After an hour, when they seemed even calmer than when they’d arrived, he nearly exploded himself.

As they were preparing to leave, he finally said,
“Well?”

“Well, what?” Rosie said.

“Don’t you have any questions?”

“We already know everything,” Poppy said.

“Of course you do. Silly me.”

“Mr. D-D, are you all right?” Rosie said, taking a step toward him and looking concerned.

“Why wouldn’t I be all right?” he said hysterically. “My neighborhood is haunted, four of my neighbors are dead, and another one is still in Intensive Care. What could possibly be bothering me?”

They started to go to him, then seemed to hit a wall. Ed was standing inside the doorway to his office, and they looked past him.

“You need to repaint your room,” Rosie told him. “Then we’ll come in and clean it again. And you need to get rid of those paintings,” she added.

“Why? They’re not of Frieda’s ghost. They’re of the daughter of a pair of grifters, who is lovely, even if she is a little off.”

“I don’t know,” Poppy said. “Miss Purity said –“

“Miss Purity would be better off running a potato farm out there, instead of calling herself a spirit medium.”

The twins stared at him.

“Now, Mr. D-D,” Rosie said, “there is no reason to get nasty. Technically, Miss Purity has a point. You’ve got no business painting the walls of your office so they can trap a ghost.”

“I happen to like Haint Blue. Anyway, justice has triumphed. What are you two looking so depressed about?”

At that moment, Dan Ryder walked down his driveway and turned down Santorini Drive, heading for the beach. The looks on the twins’ faces as they watched him said it all.

“Oh,” Ed said. “Yes. Tragic, that. It may be quite some time before that man opens his heart again.”

The twins nodded silently, collected their gear and left, moving through Technicolor daydreams of Dan Ryder running wild in the Highlands, fearless in battle, rushing toward death so he could be reunited with the only woman he had ever loved.

The End