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

Taylor took careful hold of her sandwich and said, “You’ve always liked Willa, haven’t you?”

The way he suddenly bridled, blushed and stuttered convinced her she was right: Edson Darby-Deaver had a crush. Taylor had met Willa one time and the woman was colorless, shy and forgettable. Ah, but love was blind.

Ed counter-attacked, “I was rather hoping you would bring your cat with you. Bastet. She has been useful in investigations . . . .”

“Let’s just leave her out of this for now,” Taylor said shortly.

Ed suppressed the “Ah-ha!” that sprang to his lips. Confused as his feelings were about Willa, he knew that Taylor was even more confused about the cat.

“Not many tourists on the beach tonight,” Taylor said, gazing around.

“No. The snowbirds have flown away. We never have many this far south on Crescent Beach anyway. Most of the rental condos are further north. You’re not nervous, are you – being alone on the beach at night?”

She smiled at him. “No. If any humans try to attack us, I’ll protect you, and if any ghosts attack, you can protect me. Deal?”

“Now you’re mocking me,” he said, biting into the fish sandwich.

“Not at all. I enjoyed the sunset and all, but you do realize we’ve got our backs to the lair of the restless dead, don’t you? Kind of makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?”

He gave her a sideways glance, not knowing whether or not she was still teasing him.

Suddenly, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “Let’s turn around,” he said.

Ed woke up alone in the dark. He had a vague memory of Taylor waking him to say she was leaving. He’d told her he was fine where he was, that he just wanted to stay a while longer in case Dolores and Frieda came out to dance.

The tide was coming in and the water had touched his bare feet. That must have been what woke him up. There was nobody else on the beach; no dancers, no walkers, nobody. Looking around, he saw that his chair was about to be swamped. Seagulls had scattered parts of Ed’s sandwich bun across the sand, and his bag lay open about four feet away. At least the birds had left his drink alone. It stood upright in the cup holder, and he picked it up and took a swig of warm, flat beer. With a groan, he got up and stretched as another wave washed over his feet and pulled back. He’d better gather up his trash before the tide could take it out to sea.

As he trudged through the sand carrying his things, he gazed at the dead woman’s house and wondered what still lived there. Did she truly walk among the leftovers of her life, still grasping at the treasures she’d once had?

The sound of distant laughter came to him over the waves. Seagulls? They often made human-sounding noises. He waited.

No. Nothing. He only heard the wash of the tide behind him. Frieda’s house loomed before him, dark and empty. He sensed nothing.

Taylor had carried the beach chair she’d been using back to Ed’s house and left it leaning by the garage door. Even so, managing the small cooler he’d brought with extra drinks still in it, and carrying his own chair, Ed staggered along down Santorini Drive as if he’d had many more beers than he’d actually had.

There were no street lights in their small development, but most people left their porch lights on at night. Ed had forgotten to turn his on before he left, though, and Dan Ryder never turned his on, so the end of the drive was dark.

As he approached his house, he was startled to see a man in the street.

“Hello?” he called, coming to a stop.

“Is that you, Ed?”

“Oh, Dan!” Ed said with relief. “It’s very late. Couldn’t you sleep?”

“No, I – I couldn’t. I’ve been out for a walk. On A1A,” he added quickly. “You’ve been on the beach?”

“I fell asleep out there, after watching the sunset. Well, good-night. I hope your walk tired you out enough so that you can sleep now.”

“Thanks. ‘Night.”

Ed went to the keypad beside his garage door and tapped in the code. Before he went inside, he turned and looked curiously at Dan Ryder’s house. It was still dark.

Dan never walked on A1A. He always went to the beach. He seemed almost obsessive about it. But he could hardly claim to have come from the beach when Ed was walking back from it. Ed wasn’t sure, but he could have sworn Dan had just come out of the Peaveys’ house, or at least from between the Peaveys’ house and his own. He checked his watch and saw that it was after one a.m. Strange. He didn’t know that Parker and Dan were all that friendly.

He came out of the garage a few feet and checked the Peavey house. It, too, was dark.

“Howaya today, Mr. Ryder?” Rosie said as their fantasy man opened the door. He had all his clothes on.

Dan Ryder nodded and smiled, making little crinkles at the corners of his sparkling blue eyes and setting his lips just a little lopsided, a stubble of beard tracing the line of his muscular jaw.

“Fine, and you?” he muttered not quite audibly.

“We’re just peachy,” Rosie gushed, just in case that was what he’d said.

“We’ll just get to work now,” Poppy said. “Be done before you know it.”

He nodded and disappeared into the front bedroom. Once he’d become familiar with their working routine, he had become adept at keeping out of their way, out of their sight, and avoiding their conversation. They could barely find him to say good-bye when they were done. Somehow his lack of presence made him even more tantalizing, the way a barely clothed woman is more alluring than a blatantly naked one.

They did manage to buttonhole him on the way out, though, and assure him that Mr. D-D was “on the job.”

“That man,” Rosie said, smiling and shaking her head. “He may look like the nutty professor, but he’s good. He even managed to get it out of us about the paintings, isn’t that right, Pops?”

“He gave us the third degree, all right,” Poppy said. “Mr. D-D is going to get to the bottom of things. Boy, I wouldn’t want to be interrogated by him if I was a ghost!”

“Well, that’s just fine,” Dan Ryder murmured, gently closing the door.

“See you next week,” came through the door just before it clicked.

“I’m afraid so,” he whispered to himself.

Interrogated my ass. Silly women. Fix them with a level stare and they’d tell you everything they knew, none of which mattered to anybody. Then he frowned. Their gossiping could make trouble, and now they’d gotten Ed involved. He liked Ed, in a distant, disinterested way, and hadn’t been particularly interested in Ed’s career, as described by the Double Quick Maids. Ed himself had never mentioned it to him. As for the reality show, Dan didn’t have a TV.

But now that he thought about it, he wondered what it would mean to have Ed “on the job.” Up until now, he hadn’t paid much attention to the twins’ chatter about the neighbors. They never had much to say about the one and only neighbor who actually interested him. Everything else was just barnyard noise to him.

But maybe he’d better start paying more attention. They could cause a lot of trouble with their snooping.

And maybe he’d better make an effort to keep track of Ed and see what he was doing. Have a beer with him. Get him talking.

Dan was good at letting other people talk.

“Mr. Renter” was next. He was the nondescript, plain-vanilla man renting the Greenes’ house while they sailed their yacht to the Bahamas. Or was it the Virgin Islands? The twins had never been to either place, and for all they knew they were the
same
place, out there in a balmy ocean with a lot of vacationers scrambling around to see everything before they were due back at the cruise ship, except the Greenes were way above cruise ships. No, they were probably at some yacht club, bragging about their seamanship, drinking hard liquor and dining on teeny little appetizers made of raw fish.

At least that’s how the twins imagined it, when they weren’t imagining a pirate apocalypse where the Greenes were thrown overboard screaming.

“This won’t take long,” Poppy commented as they went up the driveway. “It never does.”

“Bachelors are easy,” Rosie agreed.

Though he was “Mr. Renter” in their private talks, his name was actually Rod Johnson, and they greeted him professionally with, “Good morning, Mr. Johnson,” when he opened the door.

“Ladies, come in, come in,” he said with the kind of friendliness they would’ve enjoyed more from Dan Ryder. From Rod Johnson, it somehow didn’t interest them, and they went in with automatic smiles on their faces, assessing the job ahead of them and forgetting him immediately.

“You’re looking identical today,” he commented.

The joke nearly got past them, but they caught it after a beat and gave him the laugh he so obviously wanted.

“He
is
nice,” Poppy’s eyes communicated to Rosie silently.

“Let’s be kinder to him,” Rosie’s eyes said back.

“I bet you’ve heard that one a thousand times,” he said pleasantly, closing the door and regarding them with warm brown eyes.

He wasn’t bad looking, really, the twins thought. Just boring. Near sixty, with salt-and-pepper hair and a slight paunch, he wasn’t aging particularly well, though he must have been handsome when he was younger. His features were regular enough. His teeth were nice. He always dressed well, and behaved like a gentleman, although he had the irritating habit of laughing too loudly at his own jokes. In the twins’ experience, people who laughed loudly at their own jokes were trying to signal that they had, in fact, just told a joke. There was something desperate about it.

“Actually,” Poppy said, glancing at Rosie, “I don’t think I have heard that one before.”

“Nope,” Rosie confirmed.

They each held up a hand for high fives, and Rod Johnson patted their upraised palms a little awkwardly. The timing was off, but he beamed at them.

With generous smiles, they moved on to their jobs.

“So what’s going on around the neighborhood today?” Rod said, following Rosie in a lost-puppy way.

“Well . . .” She glanced at her sister for permission and received it. “The Missus across the street is getting worse, we think.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry to hear that. In what way? Is she getting more confused? Still seeing things?”

“Oh, I don’t think she’s confused at all,” Rosie said. “She knows exactly what she’s seeing, and we believe that there’s somebody there. I mean,
really
there. In fact, we’ve got Mr. Darby-Deaver on the job.”

“Ed?” Rod asked with obvious surprise. “What’s he got to do with it?”

“He’s a professional ghost hunter,” Rosie said loftily. “Haven’t you ever seen his show? He’s on TV. He’ll get to the bottom of it.”

“He knows what he’s doing,” Poppy added. “He’s been at it for years.”

“Oh, ghosts, is it? He’s on TV? I didn’t know. Caught a lot of ghosts, has he?” Rod asked, trying to hang in there.

Rosie looked into his eyes and saw no irony and no condescension, so she told him.

“He hasn’t caught any ghosts at all, as far as we know. That’s not his job on the show. He’s the one who explains how it’s
not
a ghost.”

Rod blinked, gave his head a little shake and tried to process what she was saying.

Rosie went gaily on, oblivious to the fact that Rod had no idea what she was talking about. “But Poppy and I
know
that Miss Frieda is there. We’ve felt her. Yes, there’s something for Mr. D-D to find this time, and we’re sure he’s going to find it. Then he’ll put it on TV.”

“Well that’s just fine,” Rod said lamely.

“And get rid of it,” Poppy added pointedly just before entering the front bedroom and starting up the vacuum.

Rod said something to Rosie, but over the noise of the vac, she didn’t catch it.

“
What?
”

“I said, how’s Willa these days?”

“Dunno,” Rosie said. “Haven’t seen her yet. She’s next.”

“Oh,” Rod Johnson said. “That’s right.”

“Poor man, he’s got it bad,” Rosie said as they walked down the drive toward the next house.

Willa Garden’s house, like Claire Ford’s, had a second floor, but wouldn’t take much longer than the ranch houses. Neither Claire nor Willa had ever had any guests, and the ground floor rooms only needed a flick of the dust rag and a hard stare, which is exactly what they got.

“He sure does,” Poppy agreed, “though what anybody sees in Willa Garden I can’t figure out. She might’ve been pretty once, but she’s all faded out now. You know what? I think Mr. D-D’s got a thing for her too.”

“Get out!”

“No, really.”

Rosie pondered. “You know,” she said at last, “you may be right. Willa Garden, femme fatale.”

They were still laughing when they heard a sound that was crowned with a chorus of angels in their quivering ears: The light rhythm of a jogger coming up behind them. It could only be
him
.

Looking back they gave him their very best wishes for a wonderful run on the beach on this fine summer day, wasn’t it just lovely out and just look at that sky, all blue and sunny, right, Mr. Ryder? He silently lifted a hand as he passed them heading for the walkover. They clawed over his backside with their eyes, greedily taking in every detail.

“He’s early today,” Poppy said.

“Oh, no,” Rosie said, “he’s just in time. Maybe if we get through at Miss Willa’s quick enough, we’ll be able to see him on the beach. You know. From the third floor.”

“Yeah,” Poppy said. “That would help, wouldn’t it?”

“Like holy water on a vampire.”

Neither one laughed. They never laughed about the third floor.

Dan Ryder’s muscular form disappeared a moment after he bounded up the steps of the walkover.

After he passed them, they had drifted to a halt. Now Poppy re-hoisted her workbasket and they went on. Just at the base of Willa Garden’s driveway, Rosie whispered, “Don’t look now, but Claire Ford came out on her balcony to enjoy the view too. Maybe she’s not so dead to the world after all.”

“Don’t look either, but Miss Willa did the same thing. Maybe she’s not such an airhead after all.”

Just before Rosie punched the doorbell, she turned to her sister and said, “Nah. She’s still an airhead.”

They were still giggling when Willa called for them to come in, the door was open.