Murder on Edisto (The Edisto Island Mysteries) (2 page)

“Intruders—”

The phone died.

Her heart seemed encased in ice. They’d always feared one of their arrests would seek revenge, finding his way to their doorstep. Adrenaline crashed through the chill and pumped madly into her system. She tried to call back. Shit. She tried again. The call routed to voice mail.

“Jeb!” She ran down the aisle where he leaned on the wall reading magazines and grasped his arm.

“Geez, Mom. What—”

She dragged him toward the door, his long legs stumbling. Outside she key-fobbed the locks, jumped into the driver’s seat, and fired the engine. As soon as Jeb shut his door, she slammed her portable blue light on the dash and sped into traffic.

Jeb’s palms slapped the dash and center console as he stared wide-eyed. “Mom, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?” His voice had reverted to adolescence, breaking between words.

“Buckle your seatbelt.” Callie glanced both ways before she ran a red light.

She dialed dispatch. “This is Detective Callista Morgan. All available units to 475-C Dorchester Avenue. Suspected intruder. Be advised this is the residence of a Boston PD detective and a deputy US marshal.”

She disconnected and dropped the phone in a cup holder.

A horn blared as she gripped the steering wheel with both hands, zipping the car around an Escalade and a minivan.

“Mom!” Jeb shouted as he slammed into the door. “What—”

“That was your dad,” Callie said, channeling all her faculties into driving. She sped around an SUV through an amber light. “Something’s wrong. I need you to hold it together.”

He pushed himself back into his seat, fear etched in his face.

Callie’s heart hammered her ribs as she bridled the gas and brake pedals to ride a razor edge between arriving quickly and not arriving at all, streetlights passing like a carnival ride.

A city bus and a utility van blocked both lanes as she took another corner. Foot hard on and then off the brake, and onto the accelerator, she veered around them via the oncoming lane.

She didn’t want Jeb seeing this side of her. But she damn sure didn’t want him seeing the worst case scenario playing out in her head.

She swallowed once, then again as the first wouldn’t go down. Panic almost overwhelmed her. This could be any of his cases. Any of hers. Names and file numbers raced in her head as fast as the blocks she whizzed past. But it was the Russian’s name that stuck.

She glanced at Jeb. Was the fear in his eyes mirroring hers? She wouldn’t glance again.

Three blocks ahead, in spite of the city lights, an angry glow shone in the dusk, setting fire to the October sky.

The stench of burning wire, insulation, and wood wafted into the car vents as she turned onto her street, tires squealing. Three Boston PD units sat several doors down from her address. Flames licked out the bottom floor windows of her two-story white-clapboard home, getting lost in clouds of gray smoke choking the air. Flickering shadows confirmed advancement to the second floor.

Oh my God, John!

She jammed the car into park and leaped out. An officer turned and caught her in mid-stride. She struggled to get free, but he tightened his hold.

“You can’t go in there, Detective Morgan.”

She stared helplessly at the blaze, the wall of heat searing her face.

“Did anyone . . . did my husband get out?” Craning her neck, she scoured the gawking faces. Sleeve over her nose, she shouted, “He’s blond, six-feet—” then she gagged on thick fumes.

“We don’t know yet if anyone—”

An explosion shot flames out of the roof. She pulled against the officer. “John!”

Fire fighters labored to unravel more hoses. In the background, she heard Jeb screaming for his father above all the sirens and people hollering.

A deafening blast. The force hurled her and the cop backward across the lawn. Air whooshed from her lungs as her back slammed into the grass. She lay half-dazed, but pain still tore through her left forearm.

Two fire fighters lifted her and smothered her burning sleeve, careful not to hit the jagged piece of half-embedded shrapnel that had ripped open her arm.

She stared numb at the burning wreckage of her home as someone fussed over her. No one could have survived that explosion. Then, as if to confirm the terrible finality, she caught the reality of John’s death in the sorrow of a fire fighter’s eyes, the slow shake of his head to his partner. Their glances back at her.

Jeb beat his way through the throng and threw himself into her arms. At first she didn’t hear his sobs, then her son’s deep wrenching cries reverberated against her collarbone. She dug her fingers into his hair, her injured arm around his trembling body.

“Shhh,” she said against Jeb’s shoulder. She couldn’t bring herself to say everything would be all right. Nothing would ever be right again. As she stroked his head, she squeezed her eyes shut, and her tears leaked into his shirt. She could pray John was kidnapped, but her heart told her it just wasn’t so.

Chapter 2

Middleton, South Carolina, June, Thirty-Two Months Later

CALLIE CRUMPLED the legal envelope into her purse.
Damn!
Gift or nightmare, she wasn’t yet certain, but the surprise offer from her parents wasn’t in her plans. Not that she had plans.

Eighteen-year-old Jeb drove them away from the Middleton subdivision with her folks, Lawton and Beverly Cantrell, three car-lengths behind. The Ford’s dash clock read noon. The June temp had already reached ninety-six degrees.

Jeb turned the five-year-old Escape onto Highway 61. “What’s in the envelope?”

“A deed.” Tension twisted her stomach. “Don’t follow so close behind that truck.”

He stared wide-eyed. “A deed to what?”

“Watch the road, Jeb.” Callie chewed the inside of her cheek and practiced slow breathing as she reconnoitered the road ahead. Kids eighteen and under comprised a large proportion of traffic accidents. “The beach house.”

“The beach house,” he mimicked in droll fashion. “Like wow. Who gets handed a freakin’ house? Come on! Act excited!” He flicked her arm. “Now you’re stuck with me on the weekends, unless you want me to commute the forty-five miles each day between Edisto and college in downtown Charleston.”

“Not when you’re driving like this, no.”

He winked. “Dang, we own a piece of the beach!”

“It’s not on the sand.”

“I know where it is. You can still hear the waves, for Pete’s sake.”

She sighed. “This was supposed to be a reflective summer, Jeb. You and I enjoying the ocean. Me deciding where to live and work.” Callie recognized her mother’s
coup
, anchoring them close, as permanent as she could.

Callie grinned weakly at her son, loving him so much, wanting desperately to take him up on his offer to stay home when college started in August. But he deserved a new start, a new normal.

Not that living on Edisto Beach was horrible confinement. Her childhood there held beautiful memories, and until classes started, Jeb could create some of his own. The soft breezes, pelicans, and rattling fronds of the trees supplied backdrop to shell collecting, kayaking, and making new friends while seated, kicking in tidal pools. Who couldn’t like that?

She hoped he would develop his own close relationship with her old white-headed neighbor Papa Beach, too. The man was a pure Godsend.

Papa had first called her three months ago from his place, asking her to visit Edisto. Her father might’ve prompted that first call, but the request beckoned her like cotton candy at the fair. She eagerly escaped the social rigidity of the Cantrells’ political lives to the healing voice of her childhood mentor. She’d spent hours chatting, sometimes sitting with him on the sand watching the orange and purple watercolor horizon. She went back three more times.

Now eighty years old, Henry Beechum, Papa Beach only to Callie, had once soothed her little girl fears, no matter how silly. And now he’d convinced her to stay at Edisto to heal amidst the Lowcountry nature and low-key lifestyle. He said her life decisions could be better made in a peaceful environment. Papa never dictated. He suggested. He listened. And he let her cry.

Callie tugged her sleeve down over the left forearm scar out of habit, then back up due to the heat. The surprise real estate gift from her father was noble, but panic seized Callie when he’d said the word
deed
. A deed made things complicated. Why couldn’t her parents let life evolve instead of forcing its hand? Why did they think she left home to start with?

She hadn’t even thanked her daddy, because that represented gratitude, not the manic fear that crawled inside her.

Callie massaged her neck. Electricity, insurance, taxes . . . in her name only.

She’d tried to remain in Boston after John’s murder, working long, exhausting hours before rushing home to stand guard over Jeb, to soothe his grief while fighting to ignore her own. Jeb’s grades had faltered, and he avoided going out at night, harboring a phobia about coming home to his mother being gone, too. They ate dinners in front of the television, watching anything but police dramas that brought reality into their living room.

Her daddy had coaxed her back to South Carolina after that long painful year in Boston. Seven times mayor of Middleton, he’d been elected under the delicate yet crafty oversight of his wife with a poli-sci major from Columbia College—in South Carolina, not New York. What Beverly didn’t have in sheepskin prestige she made up for in a dynamic crusade to keep Lawton Cantrell in power. The woman held a master’s degree in manipulation.

One month turned into two as Jeb acclimated and regained his fun-loving self after Callie’s extended leave of absence. At that point, Callie hadn’t the heart to drag him back to Massachusetts, so she enrolled him in high school. After six months of watching him thrive, she resigned from the Boston PD. Jeb was healing.

She was not.

Callie’s head slumped against her palm. She wanted to remain untethered. Scholarships and a childhood college fund established by her parents covered Jeb’s tuition. John’s insurance money and pension investment would cover them for a few years, but eventually she had to consider a job. But not yet. Just not yet.

She ought to feel lucky with a house dropped in her lap. So why didn’t she?

An hour later, Jeb pulled the SUV off Jungle Road, the Cantrells easing up in the BMW behind him. He parked in the drive and opened the car door. “How awesome is this?”

Callie stared at the house that hadn’t changed a nail in the thirty years she’d known it. Raised fourteen feet off the ground by pilings embedded ten feet deep to protect against hundred-year floods and hurricanes, the three-bedroom house welcomed visitors with teal shutters and beige-painted stairs set against creamy siding. Not huge, but tasteful, with simple class.

Her fingernails bit into the seat, as she conceded that the house was probably the best logical choice for her at the moment.
Damn you, Mother
.

“Mom?”

She feigned a smile at Jeb and whispered, “Give me a minute.”

He studied her like a textbook. “You need something?”

Callie shook her head. Then she quit rubbing the scar on her forearm and gripped the door handle as she looked up at the porch. The wind caught the teal and peach sign hanging atop the entrance’s twenty steps. It swung on tiny chains without a care in the world, like the beach child she used to be.

Her mother had named the cottage Chelsea Morning, after the Neil Diamond song. Callie knew every word to every one of the singer’s tunes, songs that had served as her lullabies and the background music to her adolescence. Slow, cleansing breaths. She played
Holly Holy
in her head.

Then she heard it: the gentle call of the surf, a distant rush and draw as rollers churned against the shore only to be sucked back into an immense ocean that never slept. A rogue seagull hovered over her head, calling once, then as he flew away on the salty current, she inhaled.

Three blocks from the water, the place held just enough privacy to deter heavy seasonal car traffic, but sat close enough for salt to devour the paintwork. The view out back, however, would later see a tired sun sink all haze-hot and liquid orange into the marsh, setting the tips of the reeds on fire before darkness swallowed the day.

Fire
.

Sunsets, dusk . . . fire. The time of day John died. The sun’s last rays dancing with licks of flame that shot her husband’s ashes into the New England air.

Callie shut down the thought before the nightmare of Boston surged back.

Jeb knocked on her window, his brows raised. He cut a glance over his shoulder at his grandmother, who waited with a suitcase in one hand and a blue orchid in the other.

Callie exhaled and exited the car.

Her father appeared with a box in one arm, offered the support of his other, and escorted her up the steps. Jeb bounded inside. Beverly strutted behind him as if waltzing into the Ritz Carlton in a white mink wrap, a poodle with its snout high at the end of a jewel-studded leash. “Let’s get you two settled in,” she said.

The woman disappeared into the master bedroom, still talking. “You haven’t met the neighbor to the left. She’s into yoga, and not just the exercises. Incense, bells, candles, mindless stuff. She’ll try to convert you into a meditating New Age fanatic.”

Callie stopped outside her childhood room, tuning out her mother. Her favorite quilt rested on her old double bed. She lowered the packing box onto it and sank into the mattress. She ran her palms gently across the stitched image of a gold starfish, her favorite sea creature. Beverly had remembered. This was the comforter pulled out of the closet each time they shifted Chelsea Morning from a rental to their short-term retreat. Bless her mother’s rare journey into sentimentality. Maybe there was hope for her—for them—yet.