Cape Refuge (21 page)

 

T
he next morning, Morgan tried desperately to keep busy. She paced the second floor of Hanover House, going from room to room and straightening up. The police had searched Gus's room but hadn't seemed to find anything.

She shivered at the thought of him being the one trying to get into Blair's house, so relentless in his efforts. She had no doubt that he would have been brutal if he had gotten in.

The bandana had convinced her that Gus was the culprit and that Jonathan had been right about him all along. She was glad Cade had him locked up.

Today might be the day that her husband was set free.

When she couldn't find anything else to do, she drifted to the door that hadn't been opened since she and Blair had taken the files out of the room and closed it behind them. She touched the knob, turned it, and stepped into her parents' room.

The fresh, clean scent of her mother's shampoo and father's shaving cream drifted on the air, and her heart swelled. She ran her hand along the bedspread, trying to picture them lying there and watching the news before turning in. How many times had she seen them like that?

She pulled the comforter back, took her father's pillow, and buried her face in it. It smelled of salt air and sea breeze, secondhand cigarette smoke from Crickets, and the slightest hint of aftershave—the unique combination of scents that she would always associate with him. She wondered if, later, when all the linens had been washed and the room had been cleared of their things, she would ever smell that scent again.

She climbed onto the bed and curled up, clutching the pillow against her chest. She felt as if she lived in a dream, one with no logical order, that made no sense. But it was no dream.

After crying for a while, she pulled herself off the bed and made it up, hiding any evidence that she had climbed onto it like a child onto a parent's lap. She went to her mother's closet and looked around at all the things stacked so neatly there. There were shoes in one corner in orderly rows on a shelf unit her father had built. On one side hung the dresses and pantsuits her mother had worn. She touched them each with reverence, feeling the fabric and the softness, picturing the way they had hung on her mother.

She looked up onto the shelves of the closet and saw an old teddy bear stuffed into the corner. It had been Blair's when she was a child, and she remembered her sister clutching that stuffed animal with all her might after skin graft surgeries that had left her weak and in pain. She had thought the teddy bear was lost. It had never occurred to her that her parents had kept it.

She went out and got a chair from the bedroom, pulled it into the closet, and stood on it carefully. She reached for the teddy bear. As she pulled it, some papers rustled beneath it. She stretched to look over the shelf and saw that the papers were in a shallow box and the teddy bear sat on it. She pulled the box out with it and got down.

She got down. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she held the teddy bear. Maybe it would give Blair comfort, she thought.

In the box there were letters from family members she had never met, people her parents had rarely spoken of. She skimmed the first one, saw nothing of importance, then turned to the second and third. Clutching the teddy bear, she tried to fathom why her parents had saved these letters over the years, what significance they might have had to be kept tucked in a box at the corner of their closet.

And then she came to one addressed to the little South Carolina town where she had been born.

Dear Thelma and Wayne,

    I've thought long and hard about writing this letter to you. It's always easier to put the blinders on and keep quiet about the sins you see in the lives of loved ones, but you have those two children involved, and as their grandmother, I can't help telling you that one day your lifestyle is going to catch up with you and fall back on your children. You can't live a life of deceit and think that God will bless it. Now I know you don't believe in God, not because you weren't taught to, Thelma, but because you want to rebel as hard as you can against what your family embraced. But in your heart I know you know better. I won't lie to the police for you anymore. But I will pray for you, and mostly I'll pray for those little girls who don't deserve parents on the wrong side of the law.

    You have a choice to make, Thelma and Wayne, a choice about how to spend your lives, a choice about how your girls will grow up. You've spun them into a dangerous web of lies and schemes, and the thought of it makes me ashamed and afraid. Turn back now before it's too late, before your children suffer, before you wind up in jail and someone else has to raise them. They don't deserve that. You know it's true.

And it was signed simply, “Mama.”

Morgan slowly got to her feet, clutching the paper in her hand. She felt as if a hand had reached in and grabbed her heart, squeezing it so tightly that the blood would not beat through.

Her parents on the wrong side of the law? She looked back at the date of the letter and saw that she was only four at the time. That couldn't be, she thought. Not her parents. Always upstanding, model citizens, always willing to help others. How could her grandmother have thought that her parents were doing anything wrong? Yet, here it was, and her parents had kept it for all these years. Her grandmother had died two years later.

She heard Sadie coming out of the bathroom and crossing the hall, and she tried to pull herself together. Quickly she folded the letter up and stuck it in her pocket, clutched the teddy bear tighter, and went to the door.

“Sadie, do you need anything?” Her voice quivered as she spoke.

“No, thank you,” she said. “It felt so good to sleep so late. I needed it.”

“Good. Just make yourself comfortable. If you get hungry, you're welcome to eat anything in the kitchen.” The words came out of her mouth by rote, almost amazing her because she didn't feel like being helpful or generous. Instead, she felt like finding a dark place and weeping again for the double loss she felt now. The loss of her parents' lives—and even worse, the possible loss of her image of them.

She stumbled downstairs to the telephone in the kitchen and dialed Blair's number.

“Hello?”

“Blair.” Morgan's voice was soft, breathless. “I found something in Mama's closet. I want you to come over here. Meet me across the street on the beach.”

Then without saying anything to anybody, she stumbled out of the house and off the porch, clutching the teddy bear to her chest and the letter in her fist. She crossed the street, out onto the sand and to the edge of the water. One of the chairs her father had built and put out there for the guests was damp with the spray of water. Without drying it off, she sat down and studied the letter again, then put it back into her pocket.

The wind whipped through her hair, slapping it into her face, and she shoved it back and wiped the tears from her eyes. After a while she heard Blair's car pull up into the driveway. Her sister came over, her loose dress flapping against her body in the wind.

Blair saw the teddy bear at once, and her step slowed. “Where'd you find that?” she asked quietly.

Morgan tried to swallow back the knot in her throat. “In Mama and Pop's closet.”

Blair reached down and took it, looked at it almost objectively, for a moment, like someone analyzing a piece of evidence. Then she sat down in the chair next to Morgan and slowly pulled the teddy bear against her. “I've wondered where this was. I think about it every now and then.”

“They kept it for you,” she said. “I guess they knew that you'd need it again.”

Blair looked out on the water, her eyes fragile and shadowed.

“There's something else.” Morgan pulled the letter out of her pocket again, slowly unfolded it. “It's a letter from Grandma.”

“Which one?” Blair asked.

“Grandma Simpson. It's to Mama and Pop. Back when I was about four and you were one.”

Blair took the letter out of her hand. “Why did they keep it all these years?”

“Read it,” she said. “You'll see.”

Morgan watched as Blair's eyes scanned over the letter. At first they were objective, as they had been when she had taken the teddy bear. Then they changed to surprise, then to astonishment, and then to a deep sadness. She brought those grieving eyes back up to her sister.

“Mama and Pop—on the wrong side of the law? That's just not possible. I can't even picture it.”

“There are other letters in that box,” Morgan said. “I haven't gone through them all. I saw a few of them. They were pretty benign. But it was almost like Mama and Pop kept them because they were some kind of connection with their family. And think about it, Blair. All these years we've never really known any of them. It was like they cut them off years ago. And this letter kind of tells us why.”

“Our parents have never broken the law,” Blair said, brooking no debate.

“But they haven't always been Christians, Blair,” Morgan said. “What if there's something about their past that we don't know, something that happened before they changed?”

“People don't change
that
much,” Blair said. “I know you believe in that new creature thing, but I don't. We're talking about inherent personality traits. Our parents have never had that kind of deceit or scheming in them. Maybe Grandma had it all wrong. Maybe she just misunderstood.”

“Mama used to grieve every year on her mother's birthday,” Morgan whispered. “One time I caught her crying, and she said she missed her, that they'd had a fight before she died and she never had a chance to reconcile.”

Blair looked back down at the letter. “Well, it shouldn't be that hard to check out. I mean, there are other family members we could call.”

“But you have to wonder how much they knew.”

“If our parents were con artists or something, people in the family would talk.”

Morgan pulled her feet up on the chair with her and hugged her knees. “Do you think this has anything to do with their murders?”

“It couldn't possibly. This was twenty-four years ago. They've done too much good since then. But I'm still going to check it out. I'm going to find out what Grandma thought, anyway. There must be cousins, nieces and nephews, people who heard something. And then there would be police reports and a rap sheet on them if they'd ever been arrested.” Her eyes drifted back out across the water as if the words “rap sheet” associated with her parents didn't quite fit. “This is all absurd, you know,” she said. “Our parents never broke a law in their lives.”

“But we don't know that much about them before we moved here,” Morgan whispered.

Blair's hand came up to cover the scar on her face, as if that was the most critical evidence of all that her parents had a secret past. She looked back down at the letter again as if somewhere embedded in the message there might be an answer about the scars she had carried most of her life.

“I'm going to get to the bottom of this, Morgan,” she said. “Trust me. If there's something to know, we're going to know it.”

Morgan sighed. “I don't know if I feel right about that. Maybe we're just supposed to let our memory of them rest as it is. It doesn't seem that respectful digging into their past, looking for things they obviously didn't want us to know. And if they did have some kind of criminal past, I'm not sure I want anyone else finding out about it either. If we get on the phone with relatives and start asking questions, it might stir up a hornets' nest.”

“We need to know,” Blair said. “I need to know. And when we get to the bottom of this, then we'll decide what to do. Agreed?”

Morgan looked out over the water as a sense of dread crushed down on her. She knew she couldn't talk her sister out of this. It was a quest that she needed to embark upon, and Morgan had no right to stand in her way. “All right,” she said finally. “Agreed.”

 

T
he Madison Boat Shop stood on the coastal side of the highway. Cars zoomed by just yards from its front porch. Behind the shop was a dock where four boats sat in various stages of disrepair. Everyone in the area who had a boat that needed working on brought it here.

And it was where Rick Dugan worked.

Gus's words about the money being stolen from the boat shop had nagged at Cade since he had arrested him, and now he stepped into the shop and looked around, breathing in the scent of lacquer and wood stain. He saw Rick out on the back deck sweeping, and he stepped across the wooden floor and into the smaller room toward the back of the building. He found Gerald Madison at his desk with a pile of paperwork spread out in front of him.

“Hey, Gerald. How's it going?” Cade said.

The old man looked up and rubbed his mustache. He was always rubbing his mustache as if it itched, and Cade didn't know why he didn't just shave the thing off. The man looked as ragged as a homeless man, even though he was probably one of the richest men in town. Cade always wanted to point him to the nearest barbershop.

“How's it going, Cade?” he said. “Hear you been busy the last few days.”

Cade shook Gerald's hand and took the seat across from the cluttered desk. A big picture window at the back of the office drew his gaze, and he looked out on the boats that some of the employees worked on.

“Hear you already arrested two people about the killings,” Gerald said. “Do you know yet why they did it?”

Cade shrugged. “I can't think why anybody would do a thing like that. But I had a couple of questions to ask you.”

The man stiffened and leaned forward on his desk. “Fire away.”

“I heard a rumor,” he said. “A rumor that you had a theft recently, that a good bit of money was stolen, but that you didn't report it.”

Gerald's mouth fell open. “Now who told you a thing like that?”

“Doesn't matter,” Cade said. “Is it true or isn't it?”

“Don't matter now,” Gerald said. “The money was returned. There was never a need to file a report.”

“Returned?” Cade asked. “How much money are we talking about?”

“Ten thousand.”

Cade whistled under his breath. “Ten thousand dollars? What, was it in the cash register?”

“No,” Gerald said. “It was embezzled.”

“Embezzled?”

“That's right,” he said. “I discovered it in the bookkeeping.”

“Then you must know who did it,” Cade said.

Gerald's eyes shot to Rick out on the deck, and Cade didn't miss it. “I have a few people who have access to my books. Maybe I trusted them a little too much. But the bottom line is it was returned.”

“Did the thief confess?” Cade asked.

“No, never did. Still not sure who did it.” He sighed and leaned back, picked up a cigar, and lit it. “I have a few ideas, but since he turned honest, I don't see no reason to press the issue.”

“So you're still trusting him with the books?”

“I didn't say that,” Gerald said. “But I figure everybody has temptation now and then. Long as their conscience turns them around, I reckon it's all right.”

Cade got up and strolled to the window, looked out at Rick working. The rumor was that he had good carpentry skills that had translated well to this business. But he'd asked Rick once what he did before coming to Cape Refuge. Rick had said he was an accountant.

“Tell me about Rick Morrison,” he said.

Gerald got quiet. Cade turned around and saw the closed look on his face. “If you think Rick Morrison had anything to do with Thelma and Wayne's murder, you're wrong. He's a decent man.”

“You sure of that?” Cade asked.

“I'm a good judge of character,” Gerald said. “Yeah, I'm sure of it.”

Cade held his eyes for a moment too long. “Is he the one who stole the money?”

Gerald looked away. “I told you I don't know who stole the money. All I know is somebody put it back, and I can't very well go firing people when I don't have any evidence, especially when no real harm was done.”

“You should have filed a police report,” Cade said. “It could happen again.”

“I don't think it will,” Gerald said. “Besides, like I said, I'm taking over the books. It's about to kill me,” he said. “But I'm doing it.”

Instead of going back to his car, Cade walked out the back door and down the deck steps. He watched Rick Morrison work on the boat for a while, then strolled along until he got near the pier and the warehouse where Thelma and Wayne had been found. A family sat fishing for crabs from the pier just outside the warehouse. He watched as a tawny-haired boy slowly pulled up his line. A crab was wrapped around the chicken neck he used for bait. He scooped the crab up with his scoop net, examined it, saw it was a female, and threw it back in, holding out for a male with more meat. The kid's little sister laughed, her sound lilting across the wind.

Cade stood there a moment, listening to the sound of a sandhill crane flying overhead and the gentle roar of the surf.

He walked back up to his squad car, got in, and sat behind the wheel. He wondered if either of the two men he had behind bars at the station really had anything to do with the killings, or if Rick Dugan out there on that boat was the culprit. He wondered if Rick had, indeed, stolen the ten thousand dollars and put it back. And he wondered how Gus really knew about it.

He started his car and pulled back onto the highway, made his way around the island back to the station. He had a lot of work to do tonight, he thought, but he was going to get answers before this day was over.