The Haunted Beach (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 4) (3 page)

“That dog is psychic,” Rosie said flatly.

“Well, I guess he can come if you need him for the sake of the show, but don’t let him break anything over at Miss Frieda’s. She has such pretty things, and they’re all valuable. The chandeliers came straight from Italy.”

Ed looked away wearily. “Even Porter can’t figure out how to break a chandelier, as long as it’s still hanging from the ceiling, but I get what you mean. No, ladies, I don’t think we’ll call on Teddy just yet. Let me get started. For the sake of keeping it ‘all in the family,’ we may need to conduct this as a private investigation.”

“Well, you know best,” Rosie said doubtfully, hoisting her tote bag and preparing to leave.

“You will keep us posted?” Poppy asked.

Ed hesitated, then glibly said, “Of course.”

Rosie gave him a level stare, then said, “See you next Monday, Mr. D-D.”

Peggy Peavey looked out her office window and saw the twins coming up the driveway. She got up and charged to the front door before they could ring the doorbell. She didn’t want them to disturb her husband, Parker. That morning when she had gone into the kitchen for breakfast, he had been pan-frying a steak. She knew what that meant. He only ate red meat in the morning when he was preparing for intergalactic war.

She opened the door for the Double-Quick Maids, put a finger to her lips, and gave them a “Shhhh!” Her blond hair was sticking up funny on one side, so they knew she had been working. She always played with her hair while she worked.

The twins understood her warning, and immediately went into stealth mode. They knew without having to be told that Mr. Peavey was writing.

Mr. P was always writing, and Mrs. P was too, but she seemed to be able to give birth to her bouncy little romances without enduring the sweat-drenched labors demanded by his sci-fi military space operas.

“It’s the Daisy Slicers again,” she explained, and Rosie and Poppy registered horror. As all of Mr. Peavey’s readers knew, the Daisy Slicers had been slipping through the arc-warps at an ever-increasing rate, and whenever they did, our gritty little band of heroes lost minor appendages (ear lobes, pinkie fingers, the occasional true love), in the desperate battle for the survival of Mankind. They always triumphed in the end, but at a terrible cost. Still, they went forth into each new adventure with undaunted courage, corny jokes, and lots of really cool weapons.

“We’ll just dust around him as usual,” Rosie whispered.

“Won’t say a word,” Poppy promised.

“And we won’t peek,” Rosie added with an impish lilt.

The twins were big fans of Parker Peavey’s
Stormchildren of Zhizzarr
series, and they had autographed copies of all of his books. Peggy Peavey’s much more tame romances occupied the next shelf down, looking sweet in pastel colors. She published under her maiden name, Margaret Mary Moser, which fit them much better than Peggy Peavey would have. Peggy Peavey just wasn’t upper-crusty enough. She was the girl next door, not the next Baroness of Brixhamptonmoor.

Sometimes, as she looked down the long lines that formed at her autograph tables in book stores, she wished she could just dash off her married name and be done with it. By the end of the day, as she got more tired and her writing got wilder, “Margaret Mary Moser” began to take up the entire flyleaf. But it was worth it to achieve just the right tone on her book covers.

As romances went, hers were very classy. High-toned. No sweaty bodies grinding around before they even say hello, and certainly no pornographic gymnastics, like you got in those grope-and-hope romances. Margaret Mary Moser did her research, which focused on fashion, not biology. Margaret Mary Moser dressed her characters accurately according to the era, right down to the shoe buckles. And Margaret Mary Moser’s name never came exploding through flames of desire on her book covers. Her heroines were spunky virgins, clever but kind, and they always got
married
, usually to royalty.

That might have gagged today’s jaded readership, but Peggy saved her books from banality with a sparkling sense of humor. Those who didn’t laugh at the intended jokes could laugh at the unintended ones. Peggy didn’t care. Either way, she got paid, and her royalties were almost equal to her husband’s.

“What about the vac?” Rosie asked, still whispering.

Peggy widened her big blue eyes and considered, much as one of her own heroines might have considered a proposition from a handsome rascal (the prince, lightly disguised).

“Last thing, when you’ve finished everything else,” she said finally. “Maybe by then he’ll break for lunch.”

“Gotcha.”

The twins went forth with mops, sponges and dust rags. The vacuum stayed in the foyer.

They didn’t have to wait until lunchtime. The Daisy Slicers were embedded in gel-sacks and jettisoned to the other side of the universe by 11:15, and when Parker Peavey staggered out of his office, tired but happy, looking for a fresh cup of coffee, Rosie fired up and went in with the vac and was done in no time.

The Peaveys were still at the breakfast bar when the twins finished cleaning and prepared to leave.

Much recovered, Parker asked them what was new in their little corner of the world.

The twins glanced at one another, lifted one eyebrow each and got ready to enjoy themselves.

“You can’t tell anybody about this,” Rosie began.

“Not a word,” Parker promised. He always looked forward to their gossip. He was a good-looking middle-aged man with dark hair, expressive brown eyes and a moustache. He had a cute way of showing nice, white teeth below the moustache, like a friendly beaver. The twins liked him a lot.

“We got Mr. D-D on the job,” Poppy said. “About what we told you about. You know,” she added largely, “
the lady who won’t go away
.”

“The terrifying Frieda,” Parker said with relish. “Sit yourselves down, girls, and tell us all about it.”

After the twins had left, the Peaveys had a more open discussion on the matter.

“Oh, come on, Parky. Frieda is dead. She’s not running around dancing on the beach at night.”

“Then who is Dolores painting those pictures of?” he asked ungrammatically, since he wasn’t writing at the moment.

Peggy sighed heavily. “I don’t know. You know how worried I’ve been about her. But I don’t like the idea of getting Ed involved. He’s a crackpot. He’s going to be wandering around the neighborhood at night recording all of us with his infrared camera.”

“He can hardly record us if we’re asleep in our houses behind locked doors. Anyway, I, for one, am fascinated, and I intend to find out what he’s doing.”

“Oh, Parker, don’t. Leave him alone.”

“What’s the matter? Usually you’re interested in everything that goes on around here. And you like his TV show.”

“It’s good for a laugh, that’s all. And Porter is adorable. But this is real, Parky. This is people we know. I don’t like this going on in our own neighborhood.”

“I see. You think it’s a barrel of laughs when it’s somebody else’s gibbering revenant, but when it’s your own former neighbor, it’s ‘Not in my back yard.’”

“I can take a joke as well as the next guy, but there are no such things as ghosts. And I still say Ed is a crackpot.”

“That doesn’t mean he won’t get results,” Parker pointed out.

“You can’t tell anybody about this,” Rosie said to Claire Ford an hour later.

“Then don’t tell me,” she answered coolly.

Some people, the twins thought in tandem, were just too wrapped up in themselves to be human. Who wouldn’t want to be let in on a secret? Especially one about folks in their own neighborhood? People they actually knew?

Claire Ford’s house was going to take a little longer than the previous two, because it had a second floor. Being the second house from the ocean, it had a view, and the master bedroom, living room, dining room and kitchen were on the second floor, with balconies on the north and south to take in the view. On the ground floor were the garage and a pair of jack-and-jill bedrooms, which the twins hit quickly on the way out. They only needed dusting. Claire was new to Santorini, and she hadn’t had company yet.

“That woman’s not flesh and blood,” Rosie groused as they finished and left the house. They walked down Claire’s driveway and opened the doors of their van. “She doesn’t even look real sometimes. Ashy blond hair, pale green eyes -- almost no eye color, in fact -- ivory white skin and spidery fingers.”

“Spidery?” It wasn’t often that Poppy didn’t understand what her sister meant.

“You know, fluttery little fingers and little tiny hands, too small to be useful. If she did a day’s work like we do she’d collapse and die.”

That part Poppy understood. “You got that right. Come the zombie apocalypse, she’ll be no practical use at the survivors’ camp. We’ll just have to cook her and eat her while she’s fresh, before the zombies get her.”

Rosie chuckled evilly. They were big zombie fans.

They stashed the tools of their trade in the back of the van, then got the cooler out of the backseat and took their sandwiches out. It was time for lunch.

Settled comfortably in the front seats with the doors open to catch the ocean breeze, they popped the tops on their Cokes, unwrapped the smoked turkey and cheese sandwiches on Kaiser rolls, and broke open a large bag of kettle chips, arranging it in the well of the console between them.

“Dead to the world,” Poppy said, not needing to explain that she was still talking about Claire Ford.

“And with looks like hers, what a waste!”

“If I looked like Kim Novak, I’d know what to do with my assets. I wouldn’t walk around all day looking hypnotized.”

“Well,” Rosie said grudgingly, “she is a widow. And the husband popped off not too long ago, right?”

Her sister nodded, chewing. “Right after they closed on the house. They were supposed to move into it together and he didn’t make it. Heart attack. Sad. Still, she’s not getting any younger. Fifty if she’s a day.”

“Forty-eight.”

Poppy didn’t even ask how Rosie knew. Between them, the twins knew a lot.

“Forty-eight ain’t young. Technically, it’d make her a cougar, in the right situation, which she’d never get into, because she’s not looking for it, but if she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone, she’d better get back in the game.”

“And the hell of it is, I think Mr. Ryder is really interested in her.”

“He is. Oh, he is.”

They both paused to ravish Daniel Ryder in feverish images. They had seen him taking off for his run on the beach many times, naked to the waist and glistening, the corded muscles of his legs working powerfully, the chiseled line of his jaw tense with raw determination, his face nakedly expressing the tortures of his soul. Not much chest hair, just enough to tickle, and no back hair at all. Unbeknownst to one another, they had both endowed him with streaming, waist-length hair instead of the white crew cut he really wore, along with a Scottish warrior’s kilt instead of beach baggies. Out of the crimson mists of imagination, his turquoise eyes blazed at them in secret agony.

“Hot,” Rosie said.

“Oh yeah,” Poppy agreed, and she didn’t mean the weather.

They drank Coke with synchronized precision, then reached into the potato chip bag at the same time, managing not to get their hands tangled. They’d been doing it all their lives.

“He’s sympathetic, at least. He seems distant, but you can see that he
cares
.”

“Yes. Yes he does. A real gentleman. A hero,” she added, not knowing why, because she really knew nothing about him. Though they’d been cleaning his house the entire five years he’d lived in Santorini, he’d hardly spoken twenty words to them. “You can see he’s retired military. Special forces.”

“Definitely.”

“Not one for a lot of words, but when we told him about The Missus last week, he was concerned. You could see it.”

“Yes you could.”

He lived directly across the street from Edson Darby-Deaver, and they’d be cleaning his house the next morning. It always made Tuesday mornings just a little bit magical, and made up a little for the creepiness of Tuesday afternoons, when they had to go into Miss Frieda’s house.

They bit into their sandwiches in tandem.

Edson was troubled the rest of the day. He liked the Brinkers, in the dispassionate way you like neighbors you don’t know intimately. He’d been secretly happy for them when Frieda had finally released them and gone her way to whatever awaits, and finding that she wouldn’t go away after all was disappointing – but exciting. A lot of wild stories came his way, but legitimate hauntings were rare.

But that was selfish. He wasn’t doing this for himself. He was doing it for Ben and Dolores. And assuming her soul had bound itself to this plane for the wrong reasons, he was doing it for Frieda, too. He’d send her on her way, whether she wanted to go or not.

He had resources. He had contacts. If he couldn’t handle it alone, he knew where to go for help. Not Teddy. He was just a showman, and as for Porter . . . Ed smiled evilly, thinking of Porter confronted with the smoldering ghost of Frieda. The dog was basically a hyperactive, slap-happy creature who didn’t know his own strength. As for sniffing out ghosts, there was only one occasion when Ed suspected he actually had, and his reaction had been to try to play with it.

Edson thought harder, narrowing his eyes to slits. The Pendragons were always willing. Then he frowned. The husband-and-wife pair of physical mediums would do anything if they could get a book out of it, and then they’d try to muscle him out of the contract. No, not the Pendragons. They had a high profile in the paranormal community and were slick when it came to getting media attention, which was exactly why Ed didn’t like them. He suspected several of their biggest “gets” to be deliberate hoaxes, yet they’d gone ahead and produced documentaries anyway, claiming to have gotten real results. They would bring too much attention to the project, and he just didn’t trust them.

Sparky Fritz, a technical genius from Savannah, was a serious investigator, like Ed himself, but he was too rock-and-roll. Too zany. Too cool for school. At the last paranormal convention, a passing psychic had told Ed that his aura was the color of anguish; outsized personalities like Sparky’s were the reason why.

“Have all the normal people taken a rocket ship to another planet?” he fretted aloud as he got up from his desk chair and began to wander around his house. When his steps brought him to the kitchen, he stopped and looked around as if he’d never seen it before.

“I’m hungry,” he said, surprised.

He made a note of a sudden inspiration on one of the twenty pads of paper he kept scattered around his house so he would always have something to write on. Descartes’ concept of the “ghost in the machine” had, naturally, always made sense to him. A ghost hunter would have to believe that the body-machine was separate from the entity within, which drove it along like a really complicated car, and that at some point the entity could step out, slam the door and go off on its own. But was the ghost sometimes overruled by the machine? Was the machine capable of taking the ghost forcibly to the place it was used to being fed if the ghost forgot to eat? Like a car hijacking its owner at a red light and making a break for the gas station?

Too distracted to make detailed notes, he scribbled “The will of the machine,” and shoved the slip of paper into his pocket.

Then, as if he had the gift of automatic writing (which he didn’t – he had no paranormal gifts and he knew it), he wrote the name, “Taylor Verone.”

Below that, slowly and precisely, he wrote, “Bastet?”

Taylor was a normal person. The fact that she was so very normal had Ed even more convinced that she did, in fact, have a paranormal connection, one she found very hard to accept. Ed, a sharp observer, always on the lookout for paranormal manifestations, believed that through a concatenation of circumstances, his friend Taylor had acquired a “familiar.”

The concept of the “familiar,” as taken from folklore – animal embodiments of elemental spirits, ancient seers, or even gods and goddesses – had never interested Ed. He was aware that witches frequently had them, but witches were outside of Ed’s field. His particular area of study was ghosts, so he tried to rigidly confine himself to hauntings. When one entered the paranormal community, one needed to exercise discipline, or one would be constantly distracted by alien encounters, chupacabra attacks, sea monster sightings, secret government agencies, etc. etc. etc. Walk from one end of the convention hall to the other and count the number of topics under discussion. Even if you consider only the groups that are about to come to blows, you will find yourself losing count and heading straight for the bar before you can reach the other end.

However.

If, for instance, an alien landed in Ed’s back yard, he would be forced to investigate. Over the past year, he had become convinced that a familiar had landed in his back yard, or at least in Taylor’s house, and he felt called upon to study the phenomenon. This particular familiar was a gorgeous green-eyed black cat named Bastet which had taken possession of Taylor immediately before she, Taylor, had begun to demonstrate strange behavior.

“Bastet” happened to be the name of the Egyptian mother goddess, one who came forth to protect her own when they were in trouble. Bastet icons were usually in the form of a cat, but there seemed to be more to Taylor’s pet than just the exotic name. Ed was intrigued. He kept track of the situation, to Taylor’s annoyance, and his file of random notes had a very thick section on the cat. This could be an opportunity to study the phenomenon of the familiar at first hand. Taylor would be interested, because she had actually met Frieda Strawbridge in person, when the old woman had been alive.

She and Frieda had understood one another somehow, perhaps even liked one another. With women it was hard to tell. From the time that Ed’s female contemporaries had been little girls, he had been stunned at the loose talk about BFFs who did not happen to be present. But in his sessions with Frieda and Taylor, the two women had displayed an unspoken, bemused concordance which he himself had been unable to fathom. It was one of those intensely womanish things that would always befuddle Ed, but he never made the mistake of thinking that they were trivial.

And Taylor would have no interest in promoting the investigation in any way, like the Pendragons. If Ed decided to write a book, she wouldn’t even read it.

Not that he was already thinking about a book, he reminded himself. That wasn’t what this was about. It was about the Brinkers, pure and simple. And Willa. Gentle, sad, sweet Willa.

Ed quickly went back to the office and sat down at the desk. Absentmindedly he filed away his note on the ghost-in-the-machine thing, (months later he would find it and have no idea what it was about), while his eyes reflected the turmoil within. Ed was not an impulsive man, yet the urge to grab the phone and call Taylor
right now
was overwhelming. He decided to wait five minutes to consider the pros and cons. At the end of five minutes, he stretched out his hand for the phone and nearly screamed when it began to ring the split-second before he touched it. He gazed at it in astonishment, then picked it up.

“Hello?” he said breathlessly.

“Ed?”

“Taylor!” he said, shocked. He hadn’t spoken to her in months, and their relationship, though friendly, had been mainly professional. She had never just called him out of the blue. “How nice to hear from you,” he said desperately, his voice anything but natural.

“Yeah, I thought so. Something’s up, isn’t it?” She sounded weary. “A couple of hours ago I got this urge to call you, and then something happened here at Orphans, and I took care of that instead.” Orphans of the Storm was her animal shelter. “Then about five minutes ago, it hit me again. This
thing
, this voice in my head kept at me, and I finally got tired of fighting it. So you tell me, Ed. Why am I calling you?”

“Truly fascinating,” he said, scribbling “Clairaudience,” on the little pad by his phone.

“Ed!
Start talking, or I hang up. Am I going crazy, or do I just have a really weird cat.”

“Your cat? Bastet?” He leaned forward and hunkered over the desk as if the whole world was rocking. “What’s she doing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She’s just been really restless today. We had an emergency case show up earlier today – some guy grazed a stray dog with his Jeep out on A1A and brought him in for medical treatment. Fortunately the dog isn’t badly hurt, and the guy that hit him really fell for him and is keeping him. I thought that might be what Bastet was on about, but when the guy left, she was still . . . oh, what am I trying to say? Then I started thinking about you . . . oh, hell, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Do you?”

Ed carefully adjusted his glasses and arranged his thoughts. “Perhaps. Perhaps. We have a situation here at Santorini. Are you busy tonight?”

Ms. Taylor Verone got out of her car in Edson’s driveway and retrieved a carry-out bag from The Shack from the passenger seat. The foodie smell from the bag tempted her to do a quick quality control check on the French fries, and the first one was so hot and salty and good that she groaned and grabbed another one. Then she rolled the bag closed.

Ed lived in a really nice little gated community, she thought, leaning against her SUV and taking a long look. Without thinking, she re-opened the bag and took another French fry, and this time she didn’t bother to close it again. She was standing there gazing down the block and eating one fry after another when Ed came out of his house. Tired and hungry, she was tripping out on carbs, putting her brain into a pleasurable haze. What with the emergency at the animal shelter and the strange way Bastet had been acting all day, she had completely forgotten to have lunch; she was starving.

“Hey, Ed,” she said by way of greeting. “Still haven’t changed the code, huh?”

The gate code to Santorini was #-1-2-3-4, because for some time now, Dolores Brinker hadn’t been able to remember anything else.

“What?” he asked, distracted from an intense train of thought.

“Just taking a look around out here. Nice night, huh? Want to eat on the beach?”

“What?” He still hadn’t processed her first question, and now she was changing the subject. Then it struck him that she smelled really good. In another moment, he realized it was the open bag in her hands that smelled really good, not her. He refocused on the bag, while Taylor relaxed and quietly ate in front of him.

“Really nice, night,” she murmured, gazing down the drive toward the beach.

The Santorini houses looked like soft blocks of vanilla ice cream, randomly cut and piled together in creamy white chunks. Sharp, bluish shadows edged the angles, and red tile roofs capped multiple levels, including little shaded balconies. The coming sunset filled the air with liquid tones of gold.

Taylor sighed contentedly. “I like your neighborhood.” For the first time, she looked directly at him. He was gazing owlishly at the sack. “You haven’t eaten today, have you?”

“I’ve been at the computer all afternoon, doing research,” he told her, suddenly coming to life. “About the haunting. The search parameters are simply exponential in their growth-rate. Ghosts that dance. Beach hauntings. Scene-of-death hauntings. The mother-daughter bond. So many aspects to explore. Oh, wait. I haven’t told you about it yet. Or have I?”

“Ed, honey,” she said kindly, “you’re delirious. Let’s go to the beach and eat.”

“Okay,” he said without resentment. “I’ll get some folding chairs out of the garage and we’ll watch the sunset.”

“Lovely. Got any beer?”

He did.

“How is Michael?” Ed asked in his best formal manner, once they were settled in their beach chairs. Michael was Taylor’s live-in lover.

“Fine, I guess. He’s wandering around Europe with a bunch of other lawyers.”

Ed blinked. “As a committee of some sort? International negotiations?”

“Oh, heck no. He’s in a retired lawyers’ association, and they organized a Grand Tour. They just left. He wanted me to go, too.”

“And you didn’t want to?”

She gave him a look. “Would you go dragging around Europe in a tour bus with thirty-three lawyers for five weeks? Some of them are actually husband-and-wife lawyers,” she added, as if that were mind-boggling. “I can just hear them all now, correcting one anothers’ facts about Ancient Rome and debating the local tour guides. Besides, I’ve got the animal shelter to run, and the tour costs $20,000. Michael would’ve paid it for me, but I couldn’t let him do that, and I’ve got a lot better things to spend that kind of money on. So tell me what’s been going on here.”

He gave her the full gist of what Poppy and Rosie had told him, then lowered his voice and added, “I’m particularly worried about Willa Garden.”

“I thought they said it was Dolores who was in trouble.”

They had settled down facing the ocean, snugged their beer cans into the cup holders of the folding chairs and were getting the grouper sandwiches out of the Styrofoam boxes. They had finished the French fries while they were still on the walkover to the beach.

“No one ever considers Willa,” Ed fretted. “She and Dolores were
both
slaves to Frieda, but Willa’s position has always been the more delicate. She had no standing in Frieda Strawbridge’s life, and yet through no fault of her own she was completely dependent upon her. She and Dolores nursed her through to the end. Willa is the one who found her dead one morning, you know.”